The Kiss

It's easier than you think to create a monster

This week a short and macabre tale of monsters in an unbalanced world. It might seem familiar, in a strange way, because after all, it’s hard to tell what’s real and what’s a fever dream these days.

Plus, there will be a SPECIAL post coming your way over the weekend, so keep your eyes peeled. Until then, enjoy this little monstrosity…

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Photo by Anne Nygård on Unsplash

I’m waiting at a train station cafe in a city, a strange and peculiar city, except it’s not.

There’s a kind of fever here, the whole city has lost balance, teetering toward a cliff edge.

Everyone is telling the same stories, having the same conversations, lurching one way or another, suddenly for or against things they knew nothing about yesterday, things they still know nothing about, except now they’re for or against them. Suddenly.

The Billionaire’s face is everywhere, on every screen, which is the only place anyone looks now. That banal, commonplace face with its complex range of arrogant expressions, reflecting back the very worst of each of us, the parts we’ve spent a lifetime avoiding, or confronting, or accepting.

I am writing in my note pad as a waiter saunters up and clatters my coffee down, all the finesse and theatre squeezed out of him. He looks me up and down, a little aggressively, not yet sure if he’s for or against me. Probably against. I am acting strangely after all, writing in a notebook, in ink.

In my notebook I am writing:

If you create a monster don’t be surprised when it turns around and eats you.

It easier than you think to create a monster.

The same way a grain of sand in the wind will eventually erode a mountain, you only need to turn a blind eye to all the tiny unkindnesses and cruelties for long enough and eventually a monster will arise.

This we have done.

This billionaire is the face of the monster, but he is not the only monster. The monster is inside all of us. That’s why I find it so hard to look at him. I see myself.

I take a sip of my coffee. There’s so much in this city that’s so wonderful, so much nobody notices anymore. That’s another symptom. There are as many symptoms of this fever as there are grains of sand slowly eroding all of us away.

The waiter is watching me because he is bored and I have an aura, which sometimes helps and sometimes doesn’t in my line of work. The cafe is half crowded with passengers waiting to head out of the city. Not that they’ll escape the fever though. They are the fever.

I close my notebook and sit a moment to gather myself. Then I make my way to the platform. The press are already there, and his security people, and the police, and a crowd of extras blended with genuine sycophants. The billionaire would never travel by train, this is just a propaganda shoot, he only boarded the train one mile up track. It’s probably the first time he’s even seen a train.

The train has pulled in and the tension rises. I am closing in on the crowd as the billionaire leans out of the train door, hand raised in salute. His presence is a strange blend of familiarity and astonishment.

I do not look at him. I walk around the edge of the crowd but keep in plain sight like a self-aware celebrity drawing attention through my exaggerated invisibility. Naturally he sees me from the train and within moments there comes the tap on my shoulder. A man. He looks me up and down, a little aggressively too, and says “He would like you in a photo.” I place my hand across my breasts in surprise and excitement. He raises one eyebrow, of course he wants you, look at you. He takes my upper arm and leads me toward the billionaire whose eyes strip me, invade me, colonise my personal territory. He beams at me as I am placed upon that sacred ground onto which every lens in the world is focused.

I knew his lust would boil and bubble and overflow. I knew his narcissism would extend its filthy fingers around my neck and drag me toward him. My sacred womanhood is a treasure. He must be seen to possess all that he cannot be. He would stuff me and hang me upon his wall.

A facet of my glorious power is his gluttonous craving.

He utters a few banalities to the so-called Press as the supernova of light and attention focuses upon him, and in this sublime moment of his hallowed joy he glances toward me and then, with supreme timing I finally look into his eyes, a glassy open look, a capitulating look, a hollow submissive surrender of a look and he cannot resist and succumbs to his own narcissism, believing himself to be irresistible he leans in and kisses me, of course he does, never one to miss a glorious image for the spectacle, and then he reaches around me and pulls me toward him to a crescendo of cheers and adulation. The power. Oh, the filthy power.

And it is done.

He’ll collapse within an hour. My lipstick is a veritable witch’s brew of toxins, taipoxin, neurotoxins, procoagulants, and myotoxins. He’ll experience respiratory failure, then cardiovascular collapse and within 6 hours he’ll be dead. My blood is streaming with Western Taipan snakebite antidote. His blood is being stripped, invaded and colonised. But for the time being he is still basking in his sociopathic death-cult narcissism.

We both smile hugely for the cameras.

As I’m walking away, just another chattel used and abused, I think:

There are all kinds of monsters.

Some appear only when the environment is just right, when power, inequality, and corruption lead to such exploitation and oppression that a dangerous fever infects the land.

That is the time when new monsters are birthed.

I have been born.

Fear me.

I’ll write that in my notebook later over a coffee, waiting for the next monster to take his place.

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